Your appliance is broken and your repair quest has brought you to Fixitnow.com. Your knees wobble and your bowels rumble as you contemplate doing the repair yourself. Since he is omniscient (and he knows it), the Samurai hears your question before you even ask it: “What am I in for if I decide to do this repair myself?”

Introducing Samurai’s User-friendly Difficulty Scale (SUDS). Created just for Fixitnow.com Grasshoppers, the Samurai has developed a proprietary scale for rating the difficulty of appliance repairs. SUDS is based on the universally-understood six-pack: the more difficult a repair task is, the more suds it takes to get through it. So now, when I’m helping you do a repair, either in the Appliantology Group or in Live Help, I can quantify the difficulty of the repair task that lies before you using a scale we can all understand: SUDS. Simple. Intuitive. Fermented. That’s the Samurai Way.

After you complete your repair using the myriad resources at Fixitnow.com or the Appliantology Group, you can return the favor and help the Samurai maintain his own supply of suds by giving to the United Samurai Beer Fund. Cheers!

SAMURAI’S USER-FRIENDLY DIFFICULTY SCALE (SUDS) for assessing appliance repair task difficulty
	Cake walk. You’ll be done before your beer gets warm. This is simple stuff that requires few, if any, tools and almost no electrical skills.
	Not too bad, but you’ll need a refill on your beer. You’ll only need ordinary tools, nothing specialized. You may need a multimeter to make a simple continuity check.
	You’ll need a little buzz to get through this one. Basic set of common tools and some specialty tools required. If it’s an electrical problem, you’ll need your multimeter and the wiring diagram.
	Get the kids out of earshot, adult language forthcoming. Settle in and get ready to spend some time on this one. No quick fix here, Hoss.
	A third arm growing out of the middle of your chest would be helpful. Time and pain, that’s what you’re in for here. If it’s an electrical problem, get ready for a brain teaser. If mechanical, you’ll be giving libations of your own blood from the skin scraped off your knuckles.
	What were the engineers smoking when they designed this damn thing? When you’re done with this one, you’ll probably want to hunt down the sadists who designed your appliance so you can give them a taste of the living hell they put you through.